The quest for effective punctuation, especially the realm of bizarre punctuation, is one of the most fascinating developments in history. Over the years, innovators and linguists have tried to help us express ideas on the page, inventing a parade of symbols that ultimately didn’t stick.
Understanding Bizarre Punctuation
10 Interrobang
Most of us settle for a side‑by‑side ?! when we want to shout‑ask at the same time. In 1962, advertising whiz Martin K. Speckter decided the world deserved a cleaner solution. He birthed the interrobang – a single glyph that fuses a question mark and an exclamation point into one.
Speckter’s design stacked the two marks, aiming to make rhetorical questions in ads both clear and eye‑catching. Imagine the tagline, “What? A Refrigerator That Makes Its Own Ice Cubes?” – the interrobang would instantly signal excitement wrapped in a question.
Early buzz was strong, but typewriters lacked the character, and most typists ignored the novelty. Though it never became a staple in advertising copy, the interrobang lives on as a special character in both Apple and Microsoft operating systems, keeping a tiny hope of revival alive.
9 Herve‑Bazin’s Punctuation
French author‑designer Jean‑Pierre Marie Herve‑Bazin took a whimsical turn in the 1960s. In 1966 he released a series of essays (under a pseudonym) that introduced six new emotive symbols – love, certitude, authority, irony, acclamation, and doubt.
The most memorable was the “love point,” two facing question marks that form a heart shape – essentially the ancestor of today’s heart emoji. While his essays were tongue‑in‑cheek, they encouraged writers to sprinkle extra nuance into prose. Unfortunately, redesigning typewriters for such niche symbols was a non‑starter, and the marks faded into a niche collector’s curiosity.
8 Fleuron (Or Hedera)
The fleuron, also called a hedera, is an ornamental leaf‑shaped glyph that once peppered ancient Latin and Greek manuscripts. Beyond its decorative charm, it served a practical purpose: marking paragraph breaks in blocks of continuous text.
When modern typography and printing took over, the fleuron lost its functional role. A handful of contemporary typefaces still encode the symbol, and it enjoys a quirky afterlife in upscale restaurant menus, where designers use it purely for visual flair.
7 Asterism
The asterism, a triangle of three asterisks, rose to prominence in the 19th century as a paragraph‑breaker. Named after the astronomical term for a tight star cluster, it flagged sub‑chapters and highlighted important passages.
Beyond typography, composers like Russian critic César Cui used the asterism to conceal their names, and German composer Robert Schumann instructed publishers to replace titles with the symbol, turning it into a tool for artistic secrecy. Though the asterism fell out of everyday use, it remains programmed into modern word processors.
6 Aristophanes’s Punctuation
In ancient Greece, reading was a daunting exercise because texts lacked any visual cues. Around 400 BC, playwright Aristophanes tried to remedy this by introducing three dots placed at different heights after sentences. The highest dot signaled the longest pause, the middle dot the briefest, and the lowest a moderate break.
Although his system never caught on in his lifetime, the concept survived. As the Roman Empire adopted punctuation, the three‑dot arrangement evolved into the modern period, colon, and comma we use today.
5 Exclamation Comma
Early in the 1990s, three Canadians (though American citizens) introduced the exclamation comma, a hybrid of an exclamation point and a comma designed to convey excitement mid‑sentence. Their motivation was simple: English sentences sometimes shift tone halfway through, and the traditional punctuation options fell short.
Take the line, “That velociraptor is so scary, but don’t worry, he’s not going to eat you.” An exclamation comma after the first clause would capture the thrill of the velociraptor warning while letting the sentence continue with a calmer tone.
Despite a brief patent (expired 1995) and renewed interest in recent years, the mark never entered mainstream usage.
4 ElRey Mark
Business communication often feels stuck between a flat period and an over‑enthusiastic exclamation point. Ellen Susan tackled this gap in 2012 with the ElRey mark, a symbol meant to convey a moderate dose of optimism or confidence without looking like teenage Facebook chatter.
Targeted at the corporate world, the ElRey mark promised a way to project positivity while maintaining professionalism. Its name, derived from the Spanish “el rey” (the king), was meant to evoke a sense of regal composure that only raises its voice when truly necessary.
3 Interpunct
Aristophanes’s three‑dot system eventually gave rise to the middle dot, or interpunct, which the Romans adopted for pauses between words and within compounds. Its usage was erratic – sometimes appearing between every word, other times disappearing entirely.
When the Roman Empire fell, the interpunct became a relic, but it survived in niche roles: as a multiplication sign in mathematics, a pronunciation guide in dictionaries, and a diacritical mark in Catalan orthography.
2 Irony Mark
By the Renaissance, readers wanted a visual cue for irony. In 1668, English vicar John Wilkins proposed an inverted exclamation point to flag ironic statements. Later, French writers experimented with various symbols, the most popular being Alcanter de Brahm’s “point d’ironie,” a whip‑like question mark.
Even the 1960s saw attempts – Herve‑Bazin suggested the Greek letter phi, and in 2007 the Dutch literary foundation CPNB added its own version. After four centuries of trial, the irony mark still hasn’t secured a place on our keyboards.
1 SarcMark
Online sarcasm is notoriously hard to read, leading to countless misunderstandings. In 2006, Douglas Sak launched the SarcMark, a dedicated punctuation glyph to flag sarcasm, and packaged it as a modestly priced software add‑on.Although news outlets initially covered the novelty, the internet already had its own workarounds: emojis and the “/s” tag on Reddit. Many argued that explicitly marking sarcasm defeats its subtlety, and the SarcMark soon slipped back into obscurity.
Today it remains a quirky footnote in the history of punctuation experiments.